These are uncertain times.  Although our plans are moving along on schedule, it's hard to imagine there won't be some delays either in the planning or permitting or the construction loan process. But even if we move a little slower, I remain confident that we absolutely are going to tear this little house down and replace it with something lovelier. So confident, that I have begun putting markers in the ground. These aren't metal pins, as I'm no surveyor. Survey pin But I can use a tape measure well enough to be able to figure out where, for example, my office window will be. I can estimate where the sitting room windows will be and what greenery we will be able to see through them. And I can sketch out the patio, and try to imagine what it will be like what it is not a cracked concrete yard but a charming paved courtyard. The knowledge we won't be in this house for ever, and the fact that it's already pretty ghetto, is very freeing. So I took my shar...

We got our plans approved in concept by Hermosa. This is an important milestone as it means we can start the longer and probably more complicated Coastal Commission process, as well as starting to engineer and get permits for the build itself. And a funny thing happened on the way to securing this approval. We seem to have sprouted an Accessory Dwelling Unit (aka ADU/Granny Flat/ Casita). We have always envisioned the fourth bedroom as a place for my mother-in-law to spend long periods of time - and maybe even live one day. But we had tried to draw a veil over that in our floor plans, by leaving open entrances we planned ultimately to close off. We wanted to avoid having a proper ADU because we thought it might cause problems with the City - more parking requirements, for example. And with the Coastal Commission, who want fewer people living in Coastal Zones, not more. But Governor Gavin Newsom's housing bill  of late 2019 has changed all that. He's dying for people to ...

At last, plans are in and the clock is ticking! We have submitted our plans to Hermosa Beach City Hall for 'approval in principle'. The package included: Floor plans and exterior elevations - to demonstrate that we plan to observe the planning code and build an actual house, which is set back from the plot borders as required, and is no taller than it should be, and has doors and windows and a roof and walls. Civil Sheets - the wretched 'c-sheets' which took forever and are the reason we didn't get plans in at the end of last year. These show that we will capture and filter all the water that lands on the property as well as that leaves the house before releasing it to the city's drains (and therefore directly into the sea).  We're all about keeping the Santa Monica Bay clean, obvs. A large cheque. Not the largest one we'll write to the city by a long way. Still, a significant chunk. The City now has 20 days to respond - although because they a...

So said a neighbour passing by, a couple of weeks ago. If the question had come within a few days of us moving in, I might have blushed, demurred, deflected, or all three. I might have been embarrassed to admit that yes, we are tearing down this characterful beach cottage. Perhaps because of the blue clogs, and the fact it'd been in the same family for so long, Casa Del Sol is a bit of a local landmark. People dislike change. And if you've lived in Hermosa Beach for decades, you see the influx of new, larger homes as part of a worrying trend of newbies and incomers who don't respect beach culture and as a result are destroying the charm of this little surf town. I have some sympathy for the anti-gentrification in that it would be a shame if the entire town was made up of soulless new builds. It's nice to see older homes being preserved and updated, and many are worth that treatment. But here's the thing. I've lived in this house for long enough now to kno...

When you order breakfast in this country, you are often met with a barrage of questions.  Americans seem to take it in their stride but I, like most Brits I know, find it overwhelming. Choosing windows is a bit like that. There are so many more options than we had imagined. We thought we wanted steel framed windows, but it turns out they're beyond our budget. So we browsed aluminium and wood frames. We looked at ones with leading ('muntins' in American) and ones without. We considered windows you open with a crank and ones you open by pushing them out.  We reviewed retractable screens as well as the fixed kind. We weighed up sliding versus concertina french windows. And all of that was before we got onto how big they needed to be. In a way it was worse than the 'Choice Hellhole' of a breakfast order, because some of these window options were a dead-end. They'd never say 'oh if you want sausage then you have to have rye toast', would the...

But frankly in Hermosa Beach there aren't a lot of other options. So, call us foolish, but that's what we're building on. A prerequisite of the planning approvals is a soil survey. Not sure if it's for the Planning approval, the Building approval, the Coastal Commission approval, or some other body I haven't figured out yet. Either the structural or the civil engineer needs the soils survey for their work. Maybe they both do. I sniggered a bit at the idea of a soil survey because Hermosa is, as I said, entirely built on sand. I suggested I do it myself. But rules is rules and so we got our soil survey done by a proper soil surveying firm. Two men came out and spent hours boring holes and digging out dirt. A couple of weeks later we got a twelve page report which concluded that - yes - you've guessed it, this lot is all sand. Who'da thought it? It was also good to know that we are not building our house directly on a seismic fault, I guess...

We finally stopped tinkering with the floor plans, adding and subtracting stories, and dithering about roof decks. We consider these to be floor plans to be pretty much final. That is to say, they represent the house we want to build. My  previous post  shows how it will look from the outside. Here's where we landed on the floor plans (if you click the image will expand in a pop-up): Below ground Ground floor First floor (if you're British anyway) Roof And yes, I do still consider it a two story house despite the rooftop lounge and the wine room. I think we should probably celebrate. Getting to final floor plans is a major milestone: we've reached basecamp in the mountain of building a house. Or maybe we've just got our maps out and decided on a route. Either way, it's the end of a phase and a cheque has been written to the architect to prove it. Getting here only took us about a month longer than I thought it would, which isn't bad cons...